Railroaded

Will the Twin Cities' light rail megaproject get any cars off the streets? Help the environment? Save any money? Not necessarily, say its supporters--but that's not the point.

A A A Comments By Britt Robson Wednesday, Jul 8 1998

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"My biggest concern is that the cost of LRT is going to distract us and discourage us from taking up other transit issues and costs," says Wray. "When we're faced with other things we need to do, like reduce congestion on the freeways or ensure that low-income people are able to get where they're going, I'm afraid the public is going to say, 'Wait a minute; didn't we just pay half a billion dollars to get these things taken care of?'"

McLaughlin, for one, believes the window of opportunity is not open for very long. "If this first line flops, we're toast," he told the Sensible Land Use Coalition. "It has got to work."

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And yet even staunch opponents of light rail have difficulty denying its mystique. "People say, 'It's time to try something new.' But trains and streetcars are 200 years old," says Wray. "It is good propaganda, a way to play on environmental guilt. Next thing you know, they'll be painting them lime green and running them on natural gas. As Curt Johnson once said to me, it's a desire named streetcar."

"I was out in Portland not too long ago," says the university's Scheffer Lang. "The ridership was not up to expectations on the east line of their rail system and of course it wasn't affecting congestion. And yet they were going ahead and building a west line. I talked to two people about this--one was a strategic planner for the bus system and another was a senior staffer for what Portland's version of the Citizens League would be.

"They essentially gave me the same answer: 'Yeah, LRT really hasn't made much of a difference in our transportation system,' they said. 'But this is an important statement of what the community wants and what kind of community we want to be. We don't want to be auto-dominated or sprawl-dominated.'

"Later I talked to a good friend of mine who is one of the foremost experts on transportation in Canada. 'Everybody says this is the future,' he told me. 'It is kind of a monument to an idea.' Then he said, 'Better you should build pyramids. At least they don't have any operating costs.'"

City Pages intern Eric Walter contributed research to this story.